


Never Before

by stendahls



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 06:12:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18772876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stendahls/pseuds/stendahls
Summary: Three times Klaus was alone, and one time he wasn't.  (inspired by and written for Drhair76 <3)





	Never Before

**Author's Note:**

> TW: Suicide attempt, A Fuck Ton Of Sadness

Klaus was no stranger to tears.

He knew them better than he knew his own family. He had made friends with the dizziness, held hands with the shortness of breath, and shared his first kiss with the screams that shredded his throat.

Loneliness was his high school sweetheart turned blushing bride.

She shyly confessed her love to him in the mausoleum, when he ripped his fingernails clawing at the concrete. At first he screamed for help, shaking the bars, begging for anyone who heard him to _oh my God please just do something_. He had gotten a lashing for asking. So he cried in silence as the spirits repeated his pleas back to him. The terror was one thing, but the guilt was another. He couldn’t help them. He hated himself for being so useless, the only person in the world these poor people had a chance of reaching out to, and he was too scared to do anything. He didn’t blame them for trying to kill him.

Even so, the guilt and the fear wrestled and raged inside his guts until he was a heaving mess on the cold mausoleum floor. Every time the door opened and Reginald saw him in such a state, the door was quickly closed again. This would repeat until his fear and guilt had been replaced with a hollow in his chest. Loneliness held him tightly as he was being led back to the house, watching as his father filled out a scorecard with his brows furrowed in disappointment.

Klaus and Loneliness exchanged their vows on the day of Ben’s funeral.

It was a sunny day and a closed casket, the world out of sync with what a funeral should be. A pleasantly warm breeze ruffled his hair as he stared at the steel coffin of his brother. He and his siblings had begged their father for a wake, hoping that he could show some ounce of humanity in such a dire circumstance, but he refused. Klaus watched, nauseated, as his first brother was made to carry his brothers corpse to the operating room in the west wing of the house. They made eye contact as the door closed, and Klaus discovered that Loneliness had been having an affair, drawing the tears out of both of them. Klaus pretended he didn’t hear her sleeping with the rest of his siblings in the middle of the night. When he saw Luther, red eyed, shaking, exhausted, carrying a large trash bag down to the basement incinerator, Loneliness said “I do.”

They honeymooned in the back of an ambulance.

The tears stung him as he gripped tight to the oxygen mask on his face. At first, Ben had begged him to stop. He tried to listen as Klaus slurred and stuttered out a story through his tears, some awful tale about his unfaithful bride. For every sentence spoken he took a pill, until he could no longer speak. Another pill, he couldn’t see Ben. Another pill, he couldn’t see anything. Another pill, he couldn’t breathe. The next thing he experienced was the harsh burn of air entering his lungs. There was so much of it he felt like he was choking, no, wait, that was the vomit. The EMT removed the mask and sat him upright, unable to grab a bag before it was too late. Klaus fought against the man when he tried to lay him back down. He felt fine. He was broken and lonely and wanted to die, but he was fine. He was fine because Loneliness had told him that this was how things were meant to be.

Klaus left loneliness on the front lines of a battlefield.

Oh, what a beautiful divorce.

He left her after the first night of his arrival, when he cried in his bunk in the barracks. He muffled his sobs in his pillow and waited for her vague embrace, but he flinched as he felt someone new reach out. There he was, like the sun in a storm, all bright eyed and beautiful. The perfect combination of courageous and concerned. For months since then, Klaus waited to be caught, by Loneliness, by the guards, by his fellow soldiers, but that moment never came. Their love lived in the shadows, it thrived there, and for the first time since he was a child, so did Klaus. He finally wanted to be alive. He wanted to see and think and feel. He wanted the butterflies and the anxiety and the passion, the shyly held hands and the awkward stutters and the stifled moans. And he got what he wanted.

He found these things in a lover so much better than she could ever be.

But no secret can stay hidden forever.

So Loneliness caught him.

Not in bed, tangled in sheets and passion, but on his knees, bloody and screaming. He screamed louder than he ever had before, but she left him an island in the battlefield, alone with his empty paramour.

He didn’t apologize to her.

She forgave him nonetheless.

Never before had she said such sweet nothings to him than when he held that briefcase in his shaking hands.

Never before had she wrapped her hands so tightly around his throat than when he whispered his final goodbye.

Never before had she sunk her nails so deeply into him and ripped with every ounce of her strength than when he found himself sitting on the bus.


End file.
